retro

"It’s easy to denounce the tyranny of the online masses when you live in a country that has strong rule of law and institutions that address public corruption, but in China the human-flesh search engine is one of the only ways that ordinary citizens can try to go after corrupt local officials. Cases like the Lin Jiaxiang search, as imperfect as their outcomes may be, are examples of the human-flesh search as a potential mechanism for checking government excess."

"The NYC Startup Job Fair will bring students, young alumni and startups together to help place bright motivated individuals in exciting New York based companies."

Emphasis on "young".

His talk about micropayments makes me wonder why it hasn't come further than it has in all the years since it was first talked about. He mentions Google Checkout as a possible provider. But I would guess Paypal and Amazon's payment solutions have a bigger foothold. Anyone know of any widely used "micropayment" solutions?

I disagree that this is a bad idea. I think it's a good idea that hasn't been done well and it remains to be seen whether quora is up to the challenge. (btw, if anyone has an invite, i'd love to check out the site: padlane@gmail.com).

pg recently said that one of the biggest changes in his thinking since starting yc is that he no longer believes that coming from a good school is an indicator of success in a startup and that this was an unquestioned assumption of his when he started out. at the same time, it helps to have smart people around and quora definitely seems to have a few.

What's Autotune?

Auto-Tune was also used to produce the prominent altered vocal effect on Cher's "Believe," recorded in 1998. When first interviewed about this, the sound engineers claimed that they had used a vocoder, in what Sound on Sound perceived as an attempt to preserve a trade secret.[7] After the massive success of "Believe," many artists imitated the technique. It was evident in songs of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Some notable examples are Gigi D'Agostino's "La Passion" and Janet Jackson's US #1 hit "All For You," among many others. After years of relative dormancy, the effect was revived in the mid-2000s by R&B singer T-Pain, who elaborated on the effect in contemporary popular music by making active use of it in his songs, a style that has since gone on to be imitated by numerous other R&B and pop artists[8] such as Kanye West and, more recently, Jamie Foxx in his hit song, "Blame It".[9]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-Tune

In case anyone questions why the HN title is different from the NYT title, I adapted it from the subhead which reads as follows: "Grudgingly, many climate scientists are beginning to engage critics, admit mistakes and open up their data."

What is Tim Bray known for? (please excuse my ignorance)

Does anyone have any advice on whether he should delete the blog post to avoid any additional potential liability? I'm thinking about how Conan couldn't talk about his contractual discussions with NBC and imagine something similar applies in the case of legal action - but IANAL so I don't know.

Good luck with this, Ryan. This really sucks. FWIW, I thought your version was a great approach when I read about it first and significantly distinct from HARO.

His Mercurial tutorial/promotion of Kiln was a great example of how to present dense technical material in a colorful, expressive way. But between the constant drive to squeeze every penny he can out of StackOverflow, first by charging for Careers and now by looking for VC money, and the relentless agenda-pushing of his own products, I feel like I need a shill filter for anything he says.

Don't care much about the data itself but the use of Google Docs as a data source in combination with whatever flash library they're using for the visualization is an interesting approach. Too bad there aren't more details on how they're reading from Google Docs. My guess is it's a Flex graphing library. Anyone recognize it?

What about the artist/poet Jenny Holzer who tweets her latest compositions before subsequently publishing them elsewhere:

http://twitter.com/Jennyholzer

These short phrases have been the basis of her entire body of work for decades. I find it hard to believe she cannot copyright them.

West-coast residents have been particularly incensed that they wait an additional three hours after the East coast gets whatever "live" coverage there actually is in prime time, even though they are in the time zone where the Olympics actually are. What this means is that even if NBC is showing "live" coverage of its big events in New York, which is across the continent from Vancouver, it delays them three hours for Seattle, which is less than three hours south of Vancouver.

Is there a business reason for giving the East coast preferential treatment West coast events and vice versa?

"3 hosting companies out of 9 have my referral id."

But the point is, you didn't disclose the role of commercial sponsorship in your "recommendations" until you were called on it.

Because this article smells like an advertorial and it is not clear whether you are representing our interests or your own, I think this raises two questions:

(1) Why should we take seriously any recommendations from this blog if there is such explicit commercial deference?

(2) How many older posts need to be revisited for commercial sanitization that we have not called to your attention?

I wonder how many of these recommendations are sponsorship-based. Linode is curiously missing in favor of Slicehost. Considering the recent discussion here regarding changes to Slicehost's pricing options, this seems like either a striking omission or an outright plug.

Anyone tried HostGator? I'm wondering what kind of Rails hosting you're actually get for $5/month.

I'm using Dreamhost at the moment and my Rails app is crawling and barely usable.

Can't justify spending much on hosting at the moment, though, so HostGator sounds interesting if they don't throttle your resources as aggressively as Dreamhost seems to.

I see what you mean but I guess I see an important difference between creating a sockpuppet in these two circumstances.

On the one hand creating an account to protect your anonymity when you make a potentially inflammatory accusation about the behavior of a prominent member of the community.

And on the other, creating an account to make it appear that you have more support on the forum than you actually have.

I find the latter to be a serious problem whereas the former seems reasonable and ethical.

Does that somehow discredit his opinion?

"I have long suspected that Andrew has been using fake accounts or paying people to put a positive spin on his threads. The above comment was made by a brand new a account and follows a trend of other fishy comments."

I have had the same suspicion for quite a while and am surprised no one has looked into this. Glad to hear someone else thinks it's not just the little voices in my head.

This seems to directly affect programming contractor rates.

Let's say you can contract yourself out directly to a company at $200/hour in 1985.

After 1986 if, for all practical purposes, you have to go through an agency for the same work, that agency now wants their cut.

This cut could be 50% or more of the actual rate to account for expenses and profit.

So you end up going from an effective contract rate of $200/hour to a rate closer to $100/hour.

Does this mean if you're a freelance programmer, you're at risk of running afoul of this law - as Joe Stack did - if you're trying to negotiate programming contracts directly with the client rather than through an agency?

My understanding is that you can protect yourself from this law by working through employment agencies as a W2 or Corp-Corp contractor?

Is that correct?

Is so, then perhaps the programmers I've met who said they were "independent consultants" were likely working through agencies since the risks of being truly independent are too high?

The claim about Sarah Silverman's 'brilliance' seems to be this:

"Saying the word 'retarded' can only have extreme negative power if you let it and Sarah Silverman is brave, because she got on stage in front of some global minds and dropped it over and over and over."

To call Sarah Silverman 'brave' for repeating this naughty word in front of a TED audience really is retarded. If this is what it means to be a subversive comedian in 2010, Richard Pryor must be turning in his grave.

I agree that the problems HAML creates for collaboration between programmers and designers - who, as you say will never learn HAML - is the key limitation of HAML - a limitation also discussed by James Britt in his excellent post on the topic: http://www.jamesbritt.com/2009/4/29/thoughts-on-haml.

Yes but I question what function it serves and whether that function outweighs the drawback of potentially discouraging some people from participating. The last thing a new site needs is obstacles to user involvement and I would imagine your geek audience could be more sensitive to online privacy issues than, say, the more general audience of Wikipedia where this practice was first ingrained. Just my two cents.

Why are you publishing the IP addresses of people who update their listings?

"Updated 6m ago by 196.210.182.81"

James Britt wrote the definitive post (in my opinion) on the use of Haml: http://www.jamesbritt.com/2009/4/29/thoughts-on-haml

RIP. However, I hope this will make it easier for derivative works to be published. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/books/02salinger.html

As much as I'd like his feedback on my Twitter clone, I'd rather see him continue to work on extreme poverty.